Cooperative Beamforming for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks can be used for a multitude of applications but they all have in common that they need to send their collected data to some central processing node. If the sensors are located at a faraway distance from a processing node, the transmission might need the combined transmitter power of several sensors. In this paper we investigate array beamforming through cooperating sensor node transmitters. The objective of this investigation is to evaluate the performance of the random wireless sensor beamforming array and to compare its performance with different forms of diversity array systems. Simulation results show that the beamformer array works best for high elevation angles while diversity systems are more suited for low elevation angles due to the scattering environment.